Morricone Youth Launch Their Marathon Film Score Recording Project with a Zombie Classic
by delarue
It’s hard to think of a band more committed to darkly cinematic themes over the past almost twenty years than Morricone Youth. They started out covering the great Italian film composer’s work and quickly branched out into their own music. Their latest album, available on limited edition green vinyl, is a soundtrack to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a mix of pieces from the original score plus creepy new instrumentals, streaming at youtube. It’s the debut release in a planned series of fifteen (15!?!?!) albums of material the band has scored for midnight movies and silent films over the past five years. Their Halloween night show at Nighthawk Cinema in Williamsburg – where they’ll be playing the album to accompany the film – is sold out, but they’ll also be at the annual Rubulad Halloween party on Oct 29, guessing at around 11 PM. As usual, the event promises to be a Burning Man style extravaganza featuring sets by Brooklyn’s original punk Balkan horn group Hungry March Band, haphazard gutter blues/garage rockers the YeahTones and Afrobeat funk dancefloor faves Emefe, plus “cabaret Scary-Go-Round, Jessica Delfino as Lucrezia Borgia, Kostume Karaoke Lounge by Alex Pearguson, and Dark Circus Extraordinaire by Abnorm Freakoeur.” Your best deal is to show up before 9 when cover is $15, otherwise it’s an extra ten bucks. Email for location and directions.
The new album opens with the film’s original title theme, Driveway to the Cemetery: the band does it as macabre tritone art-rock with bandleader Devon E. Levins’ tiptoeing, eerily tremoloing guitar and Dan Kessler’s surreal wah synth. Barbra, the next track, circles slowly over a motorik synth theme for well over six minutes, Levins elegantly ominous tremolo-picking over the hard-hitting rhythm section of bassist John Castro – who also contributes a dead boys’ choir of wordless vocals – and drummer Kenny Shaw.
Traumatized is a lot more dynamic, and more typical of a horror film score: hammering guitars, moments of sheet terror and chaos juxtaposed with that shivery tremolo-picked theme. The spooky, barely minute-long miniature At the Gravesite reverts to the guitar-and-synth arrangement of the title theme, followed by the album’s centerpiece, the macabre art-rock anthem Beat ‘Em or Burn ‘Em, with its tricky metrics and horrified stomp-em-out interludes. The end title is the dirge Another One For the Fire, awash in tinkly glockenspiel, echo effects and evil chromatics. You’ll see this on the best albums of 2016 page here at the end of the year if we don’t run into a zombie apocalypse in the meantime.
And if you’re feeling sad that you missed out on the band’s Halloween night show, cheer up. You can catch their enigmatic, haunting, intriguingly lyrical former frontwoman Karla Rose & the Thorns playing her similarly cinematic originals at Berlin at around 8:30; LA punk legends the Dickies headline at around 10. Cover is $10.
New York Music Daily 